midas {6} rowe

Hatred cannot be born. It is like glass shards shoved past silver skin and into black veins- poison sewn into bulging lips and swollen fingers. They must shove teeth into exposed skin and words down dry throats. Hatred can only be bred through pain. I like to think that we are all good, at some point. I like to think that we are born with halos settled above our skulls and angles wing’s sewn to the skin of our backs. Before we are ruined by bittersweet smiles and angry words- by fists pressed into our skin and nails tearing open sensitive flesh. I like to think that I was something more than broken.

But I wasn’t allowed to be whole for long. Broken parents, broken home. It’s pathetic, what little chance I had to become anything more than what I am. Now that I think about it, the less I tried the better off I ever was. Their screams would always float over my head, their eyes would stick to each other and not that of their son. Their ghost. He was never an extension of their love, never a bond to sew them closer together. I was nothing but a drunken, teenage mistake and the result of the rich seizing control an unfortunate opportunity.

My parents are held together by nothing more than alimony and rusty pennies.

And their ire was that of an inferno. Mother was an heiress, fortune falling from her throat in big white dew drops. Perfection was sought within red pain and kohl lined gazes, with a wine glass in one hand and a certain kind of unsteady saunter. She would circle the bits of me she did not like with marker that would not fade for weeks, her fingernails would dig into any bit of flesh that dare hang from a twelve-year old’s rotting carcass. ”Get rid of it.” she would slur, breath like rotten grapes upon my cheeks.

And I was skipping meals by my thirteenth birthday.

The imperfections she painted upon my flesh were infectious, rashes sinking into my skin long after the black markings had washed away in cold showers. Everything she hated about me I grew to hate in turn. The soft angle of my jaw, skin raw and red from anxious rubbing and chubby fists soon turned to soft and elegant skeletons stretched upon white paper and she would smile with every bit of me that I shed for her.

Not because I loved her, not because I even wanted her approval. There was simply nothing else but my parent’s words, their laws upon my temples like the pressure of her hands upon my skin. There were expectations that I had no choice but to meet and I never knew why but there was no point asking. My words were nothing, lost within the storm of accusations I met every night.

My father was a businessman. Brown suits and crisp ties, hostility stuck to eyes that only ever regarded me down the bridge of his nose. He yearned for a strength he did not see in a child worn thin by his mother’s taunting, he yearned for a son that could concur the world and all that was left of his son was a blank slate with bones in his skin. So he took a dagger and carved out every bit of me he did not want. The parts that liked to sit in quiet corners and read books filled with happy ending and heroines.

He wanted strength and so I trained. Ran miles with only ragged breaths to stop the aching in my skull, took a job in one of his warehouses lifting boxes so heavy I thought I might snap in two. Until labor became second nature and I was not the skeleton mother had coaxed from in between childish dreams. But I was not him either. The infant they brought home wrapped in blue silk, whoever that baby was meant to be was destroyed in between my mother’s taunting and my father’s prodding and I’m not sure what kind of monster they created.

I’m not sure who I’ve become.

I know I am my mother’s pride. Her spine stood straight and shoulders relaxed. I know I am her expectations, the perfection that she sought in my childhood years personified and every imperfection is hidden beneath a layer of spiteful words and angry shouts. Humanity is weakness and humanity was bred out of me before my seventh birthday when father tore my arm from its socket after I tried to sneak a second piece of stale cake. I know I am her bittersweet smile and haughty breaths whenever something doesn’t go her way. I am everything she ever wanted in a son.

I know I am my father’s temper. Flash fire down monotone meadows, quick and angry and destroying whatever lays in its path. Gone in an instant but damage lingers upon the singed grass, embers smolder and ignite every so often and thick clouds of smoke stain a pink horizon. Beauty overcome by darkness, by rage.

They don’t pay me much mind, anymore. I was a pretty plaything for sixteen years, a vent for the anger they could not always throw at each other. Since then I’ve been alone, Frankenstein’s monster left to fend for himself without the slightest clue how to do so. All I had was power upon my fingertips. I could force weight into most any words, spin a tale of intimidation and prowess without raising a single brow.

I guess they made me strong.

Because I demand respect with strong shoulders and tight smiles. With aggression that is all I have ever known and all the kindness I ever received as a child at my disposal. I’ve never been very nice. I wasn’t treated well enough to spoil, to grow any sort of ego and yet I have somehow crafted one with determination and entitlement bestowed upon me by parents continuing to fall to pieces. Mother brought home her boyfriend one night and father send him to the hospital. Mother broke his nose.

Father didn’t say anything because he was ashamed it was a woman who shattered his bone.

That is what he expects of me I think. To hold a woman by her wings and make her mine because that is what strong men do. So I guess that’s what I do. I haven’t much thought of my future, that lays within the bloodstained palms of my broken parents and I don’t care enough to stop them from doing whatever they’d like. I’ll be dead by the end of it, anyhow.

Tonight, I do what he wants. Run my hands down her waist and feel her lips upon my own. I feel nothing else. There are no butterflies sewn to the lining of my stomach and there is no electricity to feel in the air between us. I want nothing to do with the lipstick smeared upon my chin and the hair that falls in dark curtains around my cheeks. I want nothing to do with her hands upon my skin and breathy whimpers staining the silence of a stranger’s bed.

It’s easy enough to go through the motions. To take a girl and leave her the next day without so much as a goodbye. I don’t care. Not for her, nor for how she might feel. I care not for anything but stopping the pain, to follow the footsteps carved out by every man before me it becomes easy to slip into an unconscious sort of peace. I needn’t think about the parties, about the girls. The reputation I sew with every name I never had upon my tongue to begin with. I simply am.

An asshole. A monster. A user. A drifter. A villain.

I am everything they say. Selfish and cruel, numb to the rest of the world and even more so to myself. And it’s rather funny, the types a man like me attract. Power-hungry, pain-obsessed. Those that want my wealth and those that want to inflict suffering upon others as I have so unintentionally done. They try too hard to impress a man that cares nothing for them. Their names are barely ever stuck to the insides of my tongue, let alone my skull. My ‘friends’ are nothing more than a meal ticket. A joke. Entertainment.

I have grown to use people just how my parents used me.

Funny, isn’t it?

I haven’t cried since I was a child, since I was two and they decided I was old enough to take a palm across my cheek and duct tape around my lips. Mother was bragging about it, one night when she and her friends shared wine over a fresh-cooked brunch. ”Midas never cried as a baby, see? He was smart. Realized we’d beat his fuckin’ ass if he did. Made him shuttup, yessir, an’ if he didn’t we taped his damn lips together!”

They laughed then.

I remember feeling sick to my stomach.

My father finds intelligence useless. Says no man built an empire on anything more than his brawn, that brains were nothing more than a hindrance- filled with morals and concern for others. He didn’t like it when I read books. A bit oxymoronic, really, that he expects his son to become a businessman yet shamed him for every book he ever held between shaking fingers. ”Reports are what you should be reading, boy.” He’d laugh and grab a fistful of hair that I always kept slightly-longer than they wanted. ”Fairy tales, knowledge, it does nothin’ for you in my field. You gotta know how people tick. You gotta be able to turn them into putty.”

I once hid a chemistry book beneath my floorboards.

Father burned it when he found it.

It’s not as though he thought it was bad, that learning math and science was anything to turn your nose up at, no. It simply was not within his blueprints- everything he ever expected of me. I am his perfect son and everything he says goes. Because I’m too chicken-shit to raise my voice against either of them. They simply hold too much power. It’s as though they’ve locked what’s left of my broken soul behind glass cases. I cannot raise my voice. Cannot deny a direct order.

They are the very reason I’m me, after all.